The bright, piercing morning sun of July 16, 1300, strips away the last remnants of grey fog clinging to the tiled roofs of Carravin. The lower tier of the city, once a dark maze of shattered timbers and scorched stone, now hums with a highly predictable, mechanical efficiency. The massive timber sentry gates stand completely straight, their iron bolts gleaming under the clear blue sky. Crowds of townspeople move in steady, organized lines, their leather boots clicking crisply against the scrubbed cobblestones. From the perimeter walls to the central supply vaults, every single watch post, signaling station, and ration office is fully occupied, fully operational, and running smoothly.
Duke Ferris has already dispatched his gray-robed judicial officials to handle the tedious, daily paperwork of the sectors. The administrative machine is finally moving out of the hands of the conscripts, leaving a strange, sudden quiet inside the upper office of the watch station.
Aldo sits behind the large oak desk, his posture stiff, his fingers methodically sliding the small brass rings of an abacus back and forth with a series of tiny, metallic clinks. Before him sit three neat towers of bright gold sovereigns, reflecting the morning light against the white surface of Onaga's master maps.
He checks the final column of the ledger three separate times, his dark, dead-fish eyes showing zero sign of celebration. Out of the twelve thousand gold pieces allocated by the ducal treasury, exactly ten thousand nine hundred have been spent on iron, timber, and grain. A clean, undeniable surplus of eleven hundred gold coins rests in the iron box at his feet.
Aldo looks up from the white paper, his face completely expressionless, his jaw locked in a hard line.
[Eleven hundred coins left over. It's too clean. Did the brick-kilns skimp on the thickness of the lime grout for Gate Three? Are the hinges on the warehouse doors going to snap off the moment a heavy supply wagon hits the frame? If you build a system too quickly, the grease always hides the cracks. I must have missed something.]
Comtois is sprawled across a heavy oak bench near the wide window, his massive frame soaking in the rare summer warmth. His large leather vest is completely unbuttoned, his chest hair dusted with white flour from his morning inspection of the bakery lines. He holds a large, half-eaten link of garlic sausage in his left hand, using his teeth to rip away a thick chunk before looking over at Aldo with a wide, lazy grin.
"You can stop clicking that little brass toy, chief," Comtois grunts, his voice thick with meat. He waves the sausage link toward the open street below. "The merchant wagons are rolling through Gate One right now without a single hired blade at their flanks. The big traders from the upper tier have completely fired their private bodyguards. They're walking through the alleys with nothing but an inkwell and an umbrella."
At that exact moment, the heavy velvet curtain covering the doorway is drawn aside with a crisp rustle. Duke Ferris steps into the room, his long sapphire-blue riding cloak sweeping smoothly across the polished floorboards. He looks at the towers of gold coins on the desk, then shifts his gaze to Aldo. He tilts his head slightly to the left, his perfectly groomed eyebrows knitting together into a look of genuine, aristocratic concern.
"Comtois speaks of a detail that has just reached my council table, Aldo," Ferris says, his rich baritone voice smooth and untroubled as he stops two paces from the desk. He crosses his elegant hands over his silver belt buckle. "If the visiting merchants are no longer hiring private bodyguards, what do you think will happen to the security of the upper tier? Dozens of armed, desperate men have just been thrown onto the cobblestones without a single copper of income. Idle steel turns to banditry within twenty-four hours."
Aldo doesn't blink. He flips the ledger page over with a short, dry snap of the paper.
"I have already assigned them to the smiths and the bakeries," Aldo replies flatly, his voice maintaining its flat, metronomic cadence. "The men with physical frame are currently hauling coal bags and hammering out iron reinforcing bars for the new harbor gates. The ones with old bones are guarding the flour bins and stacking loaves for the labor lines. They have bread in their mouths and iron in their hands. They don't have time to hold a rebel flag."
Ferris frowns, his pale hand rising to stroke his sharp jawline as he processes the information. His eyes drift down to the expenditure columns, his thumb tapping rapidly against his velvet thigh.
"A tidy arrangement for the men, perhaps," Ferris counters, his tone dropping into a sharper, more critical register. "But these two city departments... the smiths and the bakeries... they are consuming a massive volume of capital every single sunrise. They are eating gold like draft horses eat dry clover. How do you intend to cover the ongoing costs of these operations if you do not have enough funds from my treasury?"
Aldo ponders for a silent moment, his index finger resting lightly against the iron pommel of his shortsword. He looks through the small window, watching a fat merchant struggle to pull a stubborn mule across the new marble border.
"Establish a small, flat 'Reconstruction Toll' on all commercial carts entering the lower tier via the newly cleared roads," Aldo states clearly, his face an unreadable slate. "Two copper pieces for a small barrow, three for a double-team wagon. In exchange, we guarantee armed protection for any merchant willing to sell grain or iron directly to the department warehouses. If they try to bypass the gates, our sentries drop the timber crossbars and they can take their chances in the unpatrolled outer hills."
Duke Ferris lets out a short, dry huff from his nose, his lips curling into a look of profound, aristocratic skepticism. He looks around the small room, as if asking the bare stone walls to witness the absurdity of the proposal.
"That's not enough compensation," Ferris argues, his voice rising by a fraction of an octave. "A merchant will not hand over his coin pieces to a common conscript at a wooden gate merely for the privilege of driving down an alleyway he used to traverse for free."
"But security and trust will attract more skilled craftsmen and merchants," Aldo replies instantly, his eyes narrowing to thin slits as he looks directly into the Duke's face. "A trader who loses a three-hundred-gold wagon to a rogue Outlandish in the dark will gladly hand over three coppers to ensure his cargo reaches the wharf intact."
Duke Ferris looks completely bewildered, his handsome face frozen in a look of deep, unconvinced confusion. He blinks rapidly, his fingers twitching against his cloak as he tries to find the flaw in the young boy's logic.
"I mean, sir," Aldo continues, his voice completely deadpan as he closes the ledger with a dull thud, "that's the long-term benefit. The gold stays in the city, and the city feeds the treasure."
A heavy silence drops over the office. Ferris stands entirely still, staring at Aldo as if looking at a strange, multi-headed creature that had crawled out of the river mud. Then, slowly, with an incredibly deliberate movement of his spine, the Duke of Thromium bends his tall frame forward. He bows. It is a gesture of deep, unvarnished gratitude and immense admiration, performed with the exact, formal precision he would use before the King.
Inside his own mind, however, a sudden, freezing chill drops over Ferris's thoughts, completely independent of his polite exterior.
[My entire court of educated lords, stewards, and advisors concluded this task would take months and costs twenty thousand pieces of gold, the Duke thinks, his eyes tracking the neat towers of sovereigns on the oak desk. They sat around my wine tables for three weeks, shaking their heads and demanding a fortune just to clear the stones. And these four men... these four boys who legally own nothing but the dented iron armor on their backs... they did it in ten days for half the price.]
He straightens his posture, his pale hands smoothing the front of his sapphire doublet, but his mind remains locked in a dark, terrifying realization. The Crown's Professional Central Army isn't just a brutal force of muscle, steel, and slave-soldiers to be thrown into the trenches. It is an institution of peak intellectual, strategic, and organizational power. It is a system that takes children from foreign realms and turns them into calculating administrative machines.
[If I ever choose to rebel against the High Council or the King in the future, Ferris realizes, his jaw tightening until the bone shows sharp beneath his skin, these are the types of minds I will have to fight. They won't just match my knights in the field; they will out-calculate my entire treasury before the first arrow is notched.]
The Duke quickly banishes the dark thought from his face, his practiced, charming smile returning to his rosy lips as he steps toward the center of the room. He clears his throat, his baritone voice instantly turning bright and loud to shatter the silence.
"An exceptional display of resourcefulness, Aldo," Ferris announces, gesturing elegantly toward the iron box at his feet. "While you and Comtois are still pondering the logistics, let us resolve the matter of the remaining eleven hundred gold coins. I have made my decision. I will donate three hundred sovereigns directly to the Heilop royal family to maintain our standing at court. Four hundred will be allocated directly to the city's general fund for the purchase of road stone. And the remaining four hundred... I will give four hundred gold pieces to each of you as a personal reward for your extraordinary service."
Comtois jumps up from his oak bench so fast his sausage link flies out of his hand, bouncing off Onaga's master map before landing in the dirt. His massive face turns a bright, flushed pink with sudden, unadulterated joy. He lunges forward, his giant arms reaching across the oak desk to grab Ferris's right hand, shaking it with enough physical force to rattle the Duke's silver shoulder plates.
"THANK YOU, YOUR GRACE! THANK YOU AGAIN AND AGAIN!" Comtois bellows, his boisterous voice echoing off the timber rafters like a trumpet blast. "You're a true gentleman, Ferris! An absolute prince among men! I knew the moment I saw your blue coat that you had a heart of pure silver!"
Ferris pulls his hand back with a short, polite laugh, dabbing his fingers with a silk handkerchief to remove the faint smell of garlic sausage. He views the entire outcome as a total, unmitigated triumph for his duchy—his lower tier is secure, his trade lines are open, his economy is distinctly stronger, and his personal treasury has just saved nearly nine thousand gold pieces compared to his advisors' estimates.
Aldo adjusts his position on the wooden stool, his face completely unmoved by the mention of the four hundred gold pieces. He clears his throat, a low, dry sound that cuts through Comtois's loud thanking.
"Excuse me, sir," Aldo asks, his dead-fish eyes locking onto the Duke's face. "But where is Officer Watkins, my superior? He was supposed to review our muster rolls this morning."
Ferris scoffs, a brief, dry chuckle escaping his nose as he slides his handkerchief back into his velvet pouch.
"He's out hunting down the remaining red-masked rebels in the countryside," Ferris replies smoothly, waving a dismissive hand toward the eastern windows. "He took two squadrons of the heavy cavalry at dawn to clear the outer farms. As for you and your team... the PCA had originally set a hard operational deadline of August the first. But since you have completed the entire reconstruction on July the sixteenth... I am allowing you and your entourage to stay and visit Carravin and the four surrounding cities at your leisure."
The Duke pauses, his small smile turning into something distinctly clever, a self-satisfied gleam appearing in his pale eyes as he notes Aldo's sudden stillness.
"But do not expect to leave the sector just yet," Ferris adds, his tone dripping with an aristocratic amusement. "I have personally prepared a massive, city-wide celebration for your unit, organized entirely according to the explicit wishes of the city's inhabitants. The bakers are already heating the ovens for the festival loaves."
Aldo's left eyebrow twitches downward by a fraction of a millimeter. His fingers freeze against the brass rings of the abacus.
[This guy is incredibly clever, Aldo thinks, a heavy wave of pure, unadulterated exhaustion hitting his chest like a wet sandbag. This isn't a reward. This is a trap. He's organizing a massive, expensive festival in our names so that me and the other three have to spend every single copper of our four hundred gold rewards back into his local taverns and markets before we can even buy a new set of boots. PCA, please... I don't want a parade. I don't want a medal. Just let me go back to my quiet farmland in central Heilop where the only things that move are the turnip leaves.]
He lets out a long, silent breath through his nose, his shoulders dropping half an inch as Ferris offers a final, elegant bow of his head and glides out of the room, his two armored guards closing the heavy oak doors with a soft, final thud.
Deep within the dark, subterranean storage room beneath the watch station, the air is cold, stagnant, and thick with the heavy stench of old lye soap and rotting pine. A single beam of dusty sunlight pieces through a narrow arrow slit near the ceiling, illuminating a pile of old rubbish in the corner.
Lying flat in the dirt beneath a leaky water barrel is Comtois's grand, handwritten revolutionary Manifesto. The heavy parchment is completely waterlogged, the ink having run into a series of ugly, illegible gray smears across the paper. A small, fat river rat with a scarred ear pads silently across the front page, its sharp teeth methodically biting away thick chunks of the wet paper to line its nest. The grand dream of breaking slavery, destroying the feudal system, and dragging the nobility from their carriages is currently being reduced to a series of chewed, gray pellets in the dark, completely forgotten by its author.
Upstairs in the courtyard, the reality of the duchy's commerce crashes through the gates with the force of a tidal wave. The moment Ferris's carriage clears the avenue, the visiting merchants flood into the lower tier market square, their heavy, iron-rimmed wagons creating a deafening, continuous roar against the cobblestones.
The square instantly transforms into a chaotic, bustling sea of color and sound. Large crates of raw, unrefined copper ore are dumped unceremoniously onto the timber platforms, their metallic scent mixing with the pungent smell of wet hides and fresh fish from the river. Traders from the southern borders shout their prices into the warm air, displaying rows of beautifully made silk shirts, exotic mountain spices that make the guards sneeze, and weird, useless mechanical trinkets made of brass and glass that serve no purpose other than to draw a crowd of curious children.
In the center of the watch station porch, Comtois sits flat on an empty flour barrel, his heavy boots dangling over the edge as he methodically dumps his four hundred gold sovereigns onto a clean piece of canvas. His face is twisted into an expression of intense, ridiculous seriousness as he counts the coins one by one, stack after stack.
"Twenty... thirty... forty..." Comtois mutters, his thick index finger moving with frantic speed. He pauses, looking up at the sky with a wide, manic gleam in his eyes. "Hey, Aldo! Look at the weight of this capital! With four hundred gold pieces... I can buy at least fifty high-quality iron pikes from the smiths. We can rent a private cellar near the wharf, establish a covert weapons cache, and start recruiting the bakery workers for the vanguard cells! The revolution isn't dead, chief! It's just funded!"
Aldo stands beside the porch pillar, his vanguard cloak wrapped loosely around his shoulders as he watches a young boy chase a runaway chicken across the busy market square. He doesn't look at Comtois's gold. He doesn't look at the exotic silks or the shouting merchants. His dead-fish eyes are wide, glassy, and completely unfocused as he stares through the crowd, his mind slipping entirely away from the stone walls of Thromium.
[The cobblestones here are too grey, Aldo thinks, his internal monologue dropping into a quiet, aching hollow that he hasn't allowed himself to visit since the portal opened. They don't look like the dark, wet asphalt of the road outside my school after an April rain. I wonder if the vending machine near the station still drops that cheap canned coffee when you hit the third blue button. I wonder if my mother still sets the small white bowl on the table on Thursday nights. This world smells like old lard and raw iron. There isn't a single place here where you can just sit and listen to the hum of a power line in the twilight. I don't want this gold. I don't want this city. I just want to go home.]
A large mountain butterfly, its wings a brilliant, vibrant sky-blue, flutters down from the nearby willow trees. It hovers for a brief second over the stack of gold coins in Comtois's lap before landing gently on the dirty toe of Aldo's leather boot. The small insect opens and closes its wings in a slow, rhythmic movement, a tiny, fragile display of life against the heavy leather, completely ignored by the young captain as the shouting of the medieval market grows louder around him.